this game is absolutely gorgeous. amazing voice actors. great story etc etc but..

lack of guidelines.

this game is absolutely brutal on newplayers. no real tutorial for combat is given. i set difficulty on easy and i had a hard time getting past first quest on disabling ballista because i kept dying to 2 knights. I mean I'm the kind of player who played dragon age 2 on nightmare difficulty and I will tell you it felt pretty retarded dying over and over on easy.

took me forever to realize block takes vigor. signs menu doesn't even tell you what they do. this game just throws the player into a complex system without teaching them how the game works

also what is with inability to view controls? this was seriously infuriating for me combined with lack of tutorials. its like they built some complex tool and told you to use it without a manual. I had to take time pressing every button on the keyboard to see how the hell i can do stuff.

poorly designed early combat

i can see all the fancy goodies come in later levels when you take specializations. Ok but then why throw so many enemies at the player when he only has auto hit and barrel roll? it is not funny running out of the aggro zone hit/run forever. And I was on easy mode I can't imagine what a pain in the ass it must be on higher difficulty.



also karyan fight 2nd stage made me ragequit. first part was simple enough and fairly entertaining then on 2nd i just couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.

devs made the first part tentacles glow in orange so you know what to hit. then on 2nd stage they make a giant orange glowing mass so the player automatically assumes thats what they have to hit but every time you try to go in that direction you just die.

then it turns out you only had to climb up that rock debris. what a sick joke. why does sile shout out help on 1st stage but not on 2nd??

also why does that fight start before you can jump down onto the stage. it doesn't even warn you when to drink the potion. i had to reload because i expected the fight to start when i actually jump down on to the lair not 1 jump before.

omg i'm such an angry nerd.

I agree about the Kayran part.It is not intuitive.

There are several other parts in the game that are just plain confusing.

I understand the need for a challenge. But when it gets frustrating, it disconnects you from the story.

Youtube is your friend. I looked up someone's video of how to defeat the Kayran.

Honestly, after watching that, I thought: "What the hell? That would never have occurred to me."

It seems obvious that you should completely avoid the rubble and try to hack at the Kayran... I mean, that's what you've been doing throughout the entire game so far.

Doesn't the manual give a more in-depth explanation of combat and controls?

I agree some of the combat encounters aren't intuitive, but I just chalk that up to the learning curve (which admittedly can be steep).

My biggest annoyance so far though is more of a nitpick: not being able to name my save games.

1. The first time I killed the Kayran I was a bit drunk.
It was dead easy. Screwed up on attempt 1 and got it on the second.

(like a drunk person playing an FPS I figured looking at the sky was a good idea. Turned out it helped since I could see where its tentacles were going to land)

Second time I was sober and died again and again and again and again and again...

It turned out the patch had changed the <use spacebar> notification to a brief millisecond flash that was almost invisible so I wound up as wallpaper ever single time.

That annoyed me.

2. Potion Mixing: Automatically use the most valuable stuff in your inventory and never ever change cos what else are you going to use diamonds for?.

That annoys me too.

3. Doors.
Just doors.

4. The numpad is the one with the numbers on it. Its on the right of the keyboard. That's a good one too.

5. I'm on my second run through and am going to have to use an LTO-5 to back up the fecken save games...seriously...

If you didn't play the first game than it's hard to understand what's going on at first. They should add "previously on" (like in Dead Space 2). The combat system can be cruel for new players but if you know it well it's more than enought to start with.

Lack of guidelines? Read the manual

This, or check the journal tab like the game tells you to.

It's ironic that for years PC gamers have been bemoaning the dumbing down of games yet the first game that comes along that places the information in a manual rather than in a 30 minute tutorial before you get to play the game and people moan about it.

You don't just have a roll and auto hit at the start, you have incineration traps, health potions and stun bombs along with the ability to make more. More than enough tools to do the job

Can you imagine what would happen if games like Baldur's Gate were released today? people would demand a 3 hour long tutorial to explain the D&D ruleset instead of reading the manual. As for getting killed by a wolf outside Candlekeep, well the game fails because it simply isn't accessible enough is it?

Agreed. I got beat up pretty badly at the beginning even though I'm not a newcomer to Witcher series or RPGs in general. But then I looked at my desk and there was this piece of paper that they used to call manual back in the days. And it helped me a lot.

The beginning section is pretty tough, but there are guidelines. First, did you read the manual? I know that the trend these days is to not read game manuals (and frankly, most console game manuals are total crap), but this manual does explain a lot. Also, use the (J)ournal and read the tutorial section. I agree that the Kayran fight was a bit unfair, not really giving you much to go on and ending with a QTE that was way too small, but otherwise I thought the fights were fair.

The one thing I found in my first playthrough was that, although I died quite a few times early on, it really taught me to use all of my mage skills and to dodge. Spamming aard and standing in place tanking a group of enemies simply won't work. A lot of games don't force you to hit more than one or two buttons early on, but then the endgame becomes much harder because you never really mastered all of your skills.

Kayran's 2nd phase is pure luck. Pretty often he will throw rocks without pause, making it impossible to climb the debree and kill it, sometimes even stun-locking Geralt and leaving no chance to do anything.

I blazed through the game on normal without reading any manuals. Yes, there were parts where I died over and over again (the giant anus monster in particular) but it was all good; I figured out what I did wrong each time and then I tried again. That's how life works--practice makes perfect. Sad how so many games fail to grasp this and instead hold your hand through the entire thing.

And games that ask me if I want to decrease the difficulty after I die REALLY piss me off.